


Reliability

by yesmsmoran (elliedew)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Hurt Dean, Hurt/Comfort, elliedew attempts fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-13
Updated: 2015-04-13
Packaged: 2018-03-22 16:18:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3735463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliedew/pseuds/yesmsmoran
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean has both hands broken by a ghost with an aluminum baseball bat. After the casts come off the physical therapist suggests he take up doing something with his hands to help regain his dexterity and muscle control. As a result Sam winds up with a number of rather lumpy, uneven sweaters and scarves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reliability

**Author's Note:**

> I found this prompt somewhere, I believe it was Hoodie-Time, but now I can't find it to say I've made a stab at it.   
> I've never claimed to be a fluff writer, but well... an attempt was made.

0-0-0  
0-0-0  
0-0-0

Sam thinks of a Buggs Bunny cartoon when he sees it. 

Dean’s sitting against a tree, gun sticking out of a snow drift a couple feet away, with his eyes wide and his hands held up like he’s Doctor Sexy heading into surgery. Dean’s hands are wet, and dark, and bent all to shit like you see in crummy cartoons where someone gets their hands smashed. His fingers look like fucking zigzags and Sam’s pretty sure that’s one of his brother’s metacarpals poking through the back of his hand there. 

But, Dean’s quiet. His eyes are huge, pupils dilated, and his mouth is hanging open a little like he’s waiting to throw up. He gets the same look on his face when he eats too many deep fried jalapenos stuffed with cheese. But he’s so damned quiet!

Sam doesn’t know what to do at first, so he just stands there, hunched forward a little and stares, says; “Shit!” under his breath and lifts his hands slowly. “Okay,” He says it again; “Okay,” Then he turns away, walks five steps and dry heaves. Says, “Shit!” and kicks the baseball bat the damned ghost had been swinging at them back into the shallow grave with his scorched, shattered bones, and turns back to his brother; “Okay.”

Dean turns his head and looks up at him, doesn’t make a sound and maybe that’s worse than if he’d been screaming.   
Sam can still hear that musical TING! Of the bat hitting bone just as he’d finished emptying the lighter fluid over Corvin Heller’s bones. He hadn’t even thought that something might be wrong, even when Heller swooped down on him with the bat and Sam had kicked their lantern into the hole just as the bat made for his face. 

The bat had flown at him and Sam had barely dodged it, barely escaped without a fractured skull, bruises and cut on his shin aside. But this—

“SHIT!”

Dean’s eyes were rolling skyward and the skin around his mouth was too pale. 

He made a noise, low and quick, just a little whimper and that was it, but it was enough. Sam didn’t bother kicking dirt and mud back into the grave, didn’t bother with anything, just went to his brother and tried to pry him up without jostling his hands. Fuck, his HANDS!

It was a twenty minute hike back to the trail head where they’d left the Impala, Dean was barely responsive enough to shuffle his feet while Sam hefted most of his weight. He was quiet. When Dean was quiet it was bad. He’d bitch about a cold, or a dislocated shoulder, but it was only bitching because he was frustrated by his own pain. He didn’t let injuries and illnesses stop him, and what good would it do to whine and complain? Would it change anything? No, it would just piss Sam off, and sometimes that’s what he wanted. 

It’s when he said nothing—when he was QUIET, that Sam got worried. When he was obviously hurt and he didn’t bitch, Sam knew it was because he was trying to keep the pain under control, trying to keep himself under control because he understood the need for discretion.

Dean didn’t hide his injuries usually, unless Sam had inadvertently caused them and then it was only the ones he knew he could take care of on his own. Minus that time he’d pulled a hamstring while masturbating, he’d hide that until the day he died and Sam would pretend he didn’t know. 

This though—Oh, this. 

Dean spent the ride down the mountain sprawled over the front seat with his head against Sam’s thigh and his hands bundled gingerly in tee shirts, sweating and breathing unsteadily through flared nostrils. 

“You’re gonna be OK,” Sam said, one hand on the wheel, one hand on Dean’s throat, counting the too fast beats of his heart. “Just focus on breathing, tune it out… It’s just static.” 

“Sam,” His voice sounded sticky, slurred. “Gotta—gotta get my ring, man—they’ll cut it off—don’t let ‘em cut it off.”

Sam glanced at him, then back to the road. “What?”

Dean inhaled deeply, exhaled in a tremor; “I need you to take my ring off.” 

His ring. 

Aw, shit. 

Dean’s right hand was twisted and bent like someone had tried to make his bones into ‘W’ shapes. His ring finger was dangling backward and a shard of bone was stabbing out from above the joint toward his palm. 

Sam wanted to be sick. He breathed shallowly through his nose and tried not to touch his brother’s skin, tried not to see all the muscle and split calluses, tried not to see the yellowish marrow like pudding in the core of Dean’s broken bones. 

He made a noise as the ring came off, a low groan that hitched up into a nasal whine of pain. Sam felt like he was touching a corpse because Dean’s finger flopped around, attached only by skin and muscle— And that shard of bone slid free, fell somewhere onto Dean’s chest, disappeared against the fabric of his shirt and the splatters of blood. Sam clamped his hand around the ring and slammed his foot down onto the gas pedal. 

The car fishtailed in the gravel and snow but quickly gained momentum and Sam tried not to think about the feeling of his brother’s blood in his palms. 

0-0-0

The little country hospital can’t do much. They take one look at the damage to Dean’s hands and one nurse politely faints. 

They did, however, have enough sense to get an IV into a vein on top of Dean’s left foot and shoot him full of morphine, by the time the helicopter arrived to take him to ‘Memorial’ wherever that was, Dean was too high to care what was going on. 

It took Sam two and a half hours to get there in the car, by that time Dean was already in surgery. 

The surgery would take about six hours, or so the nurses said. To Sam it took days and all the while he was turning Dean’s ring over and over between his hands staring at the blood caked in its ridges and the little divots inside where it had been inscribed so long ago. 

Dean was unconscious for another six hours in ICU while they monitored for infection, but miraculously, he avoided one. Came around the next afternoon, still woozy from morphine, and saw Sam sitting by the bed with a grim expression on his face. 

Dean’s arms and hands were bound to his shoulders. Fingers each individually wrapped and splinted. Multiple compound fractures of both hands and seven of ten digits. His thumbs were spared, as was the index finger of his right hand, but both wrists were broken and his left radius was broken just below the wrist. 

Dean was glad, for once, that he was so sensitive to morphine because he didn’t want to feel any of it. 

The doctor said they’d put screws and pins into his wrists and hands, but there wasn’t much they could do about his fingers, the bones were too small, they’d set everything, stitched and bound them with splints. Dean thought the doctor looked like a mantis or a stick bug and just stared at him, expecting antennae to sprout spontaneously from his pointed head. 

Sam did most of the talking, which was probably for the best. 

The nurses who came to check his bandages frowned and tutted and shook their heads sadly, and one of the surgeons came in at least twice a day for the first week to check his right hand, said that the damage to Dean’s ring finger and pinky had been so severe he feared necrosis. Dean bore it all quietly with a loopy, not quite conscious expression on his face. 

The fifth day they started weaning him off the morphine and by dinner time Dean had become a tad more vocal. 

He hated the nurses. He hated that stupid gummy son-of-a-bitch Nursing Assistant that smiled at him when Dean said he had to use the toilet. He hated not being able to take care of himself. He’d been whipping his own ass since he was two, it was just fucking degrading to have some stranger do it for him. 

Sam’s eyes widened and his hands came up plaintively; “That is not a part of you I ever want to see.” 

Dean snarled and kicked the garbage can across the room. 

By day eight Dean was insufferable and it was a miracle they were able to creep out of the hospital without notice because Dean’s hands were wrapped in too much gauze to get into his sleeves and Sam had thrown one of his hooded jackets around his brother’s bare shoulders like a cape and zipped him up inside. 

It was a nine hour drive to Bobby’s, stretched to twelve because of the snow. As well as the fact the cold made Dean’s hands and arms HURT in a way that he didn’t think he had ever hurt before, and he wound up leaning out of the car with his head between his knees trying not to get vomit on his shoes. 

Bobby had Vicodin, Bobby had booze. Bobby’s house became a hellish carnival ride about thirty-five minutes after Dean had taken two of both. He didn’t try that again. 

Dean had had broken bones before. Broken fingers, broken arm, broken ribs—he knew they all hurt worse healing than they did getting broken. It didn’t prepare him for having both hands seize up so savagely that not even goddamned horse tranquilizers would touch it. 

Dean kind of whished they hadn’t left the hospital. Kind of wished he could kick Sam out of the room so he could have some peace. Kind of wished they’d just amputated both arms because there was no way that could hurt any worse than this did. 

Day twelve Bobby drove Dean into Sioux Falls to see a doctor and Dean nearly got arrested for kicking the man in the stomach when the bastard unwrapped his hands and bent his fingers. He went home with his hands wrapped in thinner gauze and casts on his arms. When Sam went to check on him upstairs he found Dean lying in bed with the blanket over his face, wet tracks across his pillow. 

The doctor gave Dean a prognosis three days later. Sent him to see a physical therapist as well as an occupational therapist. Dean wasn’t happy about either, and even less happy about the timeline. 

A year, the doctor had said. It would likely be a year before he had full range of motion again, if he ever did. 

Sam tried to talk to him, tried to assure him that everything would be OK, but Dean tuned him out, made Sam static, and sat on the sofa in Bobby’s den the rest of the evening staring at the window while the snow blew past. 

Dean equated his worth with his hands. If he couldn’t DO things, he was superfluous. Pointless—worthless. He couldn’t hunt, he couldn’t help, he couldn’t feed himself, or wash himself, or use the goddamned bathroom without help. He couldn’t even punch anything. 

So he kicked, and yelled and cursed and stomped up and down the stairs, and when his toes got too sore to let him kick anything he collapsed onto his butt in the floor and steepled his bandaged arms over his head for some kind of protection. Glared and snarled like a cornered bear—then cried himself into a stupor. 

Bobby asked him a while later if he was done and wanted something to eat. Handed Dean a spoon he’d bent into a question mark so he could pinch it between his uninjured thumb and index finger, and put a bowl of chili in front of him. 

Dean didn’t meet their eyes, wound up getting more chili on the table and his bandages than in his mouth, but damnit it was nice to be able to feed himself again. 

Things settled off after that, Dean still got angry and stomped around on occasion, but he let Sam help when he needed it, let Bobby help when he could, and didn’t snap his teeth at Sam’s fingers when his brother had to shave him because the beard he’d sprouted since his injury was starting to curl into his mouth. He didn’t like getting hair between his teeth during fun times, let alone while he was trying to feed himself. 

Days turned into weeks, the bandages thinned, the casts on his arms came off, the splints on his fingers became more metal and black elastic than gauze, and finally they were gone, leaving only braces held to his hands by Velcro he had to wear at night. 

Then the fun started. 

It took Dean a week and a half to relearn how to curl and uncurl his fingers like animal paws. His joints were so stiff, and his muscles atrophied or injured. 

The scars weren’t as bad as Sam had feared. Of course, Dean’s skin had always been resilient. His other scars were difficult to find sometimes, unless you knew what to look for. These, though red and sunken a little, would soon whiten and flatten out, eventually turn silver and fade into invisibility, only remembered when his hands were dirty and you could see the smooth places where they had been. 

He couldn’t get his ring back on. He tried a few times, but it hurt, so eventually it found a home on the cord around his neck.   
The therapists began suggesting things he could do to rebuild his dexterity. Practice flexing his hands into fists, pressing his fingertips, one by one into the pad of his thumbs. Stretches Sam had to help him with. Massages to keep the muscles limber and ease any spasms or cramps he may have. 

The day Sam came in to pick him up from the therapist’s office and found Dean sitting despondently at a table with Juliet (his occupational therapist) staring at sheets of paper with illegible infantile squiggles drawn all over them and a sour look on his face, Sam knew things might not turn out the way he wanted them to. 

The ring, and little finger on Dean’s right hand, his dominant hand, were not cooperating. They were still sluggish and numb, wouldn’t bend or extend completely when Dean flexed his hands. 

Juliet had Dean’s hand between her own, was kneading his palm with her tiny fingers and chatting away about how proud she was of his progress. Dean looked a million miles away. Some place dark and silent. 

When they got into the car, Sam asked him how his day had gone. Dean looked down at his hands in their padded braces and said nothing. 

Sam knew when there was something wrong. When Dean was quiet it was bad. He’d bitch about the little things, the things he didn’t think were severe enough to keep him down, but when he was quiet, you knew it was bad. 

He could feed himself, could clean himself, but he couldn’t write, couldn’t hold something for longer than a few minutes, couldn’t drive, couldn’t keep tension in the muscles of his hands without them cramping up like an old man’s. The therapist said it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility that he would wind up with crippling arthritis and suggested he start taking a joint health supplement. 

Dean withdrew. Was silenced by the perception of his own invalidity. 

He didn’t talk for a week and a half. 

Juliet told Sam she was worried. Worried about his progress and worried about his mental state. 

Then Sam came to take Dean home from his physical therapy appointment and found Dean standing outside the building leaned against the wall with a craggy old man with a horseshoe of hair sitting in a wheelchair. 

The old man was puffing excitedly on a fat black pipe and Dean—Dean was smiling. 

The old man looked up when Sam approached and nodded in greeting. The left side of his face and body were visibly lax and that hand had a tremor in it. He introduced himself, with only a mild slur, as Oscar. Oscar was eighty-four and had been released from the hospital recently after his third stroke. 

Oscar was a war veteran, which war(s) Sam didn’t know, the old man seemed tight lipped about the specifics. Oscar was also, apparently, quite enamored with the physical therapist’s receptionist, a large woman by the name of Sophie. Dean said Oscar had pinched her ass twice today, much to their amusement.

Dean became less tense as the week wore on. By the next Thursday’s appointment with Juliet she was proudly showcasing the difference in the scribbles on Dean’s notebook paper. The loops looked more like letters, and the squiggles looked more like lines. 

Sam and Bobby were relieved—Until the day Oscar sent home a shoebox with Dean. 

Dean kept it close to his chest the whole ride home and hid away with it upstairs. Sam didn’t know what it was, wasn’t sure what to think about dirty old men sending home secret packages with his brother. 

Spring rolled around, through and away, and by mid july Dean’s penmanship had improved to the point he was only seeing Juliet every other week and the physical therapist once a week—though you wouldn’t know it because he insisted on being driven in every Tuesday and Thursday. Sam had a feeling Dean just liked hanging out with Oscar the Grouch. 

Sam took a case in August, was gone until almost mid-September, zigzagging his way across the northeast. When he came back Dean was hidden away again, but for a completely different reason. 

Oscar had moved away to be closer to his kids and grandchildren.

Dean didn’t come downstairs that first day, and when he did on the second Sam did a double take. His brother was wearing a dark gray sweater with intricate twisted bits on the front and back. Sam had never seen him wear a sweater before. It— It looked expensive. 

“Nah,” Dean said flapping a braced hand. “Oscar gave it to me before he left.”

“Where’d he get it?”

Dean handed Sam a bottle of beer and took it back once he’d opened it; “’made it.”

Sam blinked. “He made it?”

Dean nodded and left the room. 

Sam went to ask Bobby about it, found the older man outside halfway up a ladder cleaning an empty bird’s nest out of a hole by the chimney. “So, Oscar made Dean a sweater?”

Bobby turned and stared down at him; “Don’t you say a damned thing to him about it! It helps, alright? And if it’s helpin’ him you just shut your damned mouth and let him do it, understand?”

Sam balked. “What are you talking about?”

Bobby clenched his teeth; “You’ll find out soon enough—Now, are you gonna stand there and watch me or lend a hand. I’m too old to be up a ladder like this.” 

Sam wound up on the roof patching shingles and cleaning gutters in preparation of autumn temperature change. 

It didn’t happen all at once, but Sam suspected there were hints. Shopping bags stuffed down deep into the garbage, receipts for things called ‘Aran’ or ‘blood orange’ or ‘seasonal expedited’. Mutilated butter lids it looked like someone had stabbed chopsticks into. Little tufts of colored fibers clinging to Sam’s favorite flannel that he couldn’t find the origin of. 

Dean carrying a backpack. 

A fucking BACKPACK.

Rhythmic counting from Dean’s room at night. 

Then one morning in early October Dean came down stairs and threw something around Sam’s neck as he came into the kitchen for breakfast. 

Sam’s first instinct was that someone was trying to garrote him and he grabbed at it with both hands. But what he pulled away from his throat wasn’t thin enough to use as a garrote. In fact Sam didn’t know what it was until he saw the wary, half ashamed look on Dean’s face. 

Sam made a sound in his throat; “Uhhh.”

Dean swallowed and flexed his stiff fingers. “Did you know knitting was a guy thing?”

Sam kneaded the lumpy scarf in his hands, “Really?”

Dean nodded and carefully lifted his coffee cup to his lips. He was always stiff in the mornings; “It was originally something only fishermen did. Crochet was for women, knitting was for guys.”

Sam lifted his chin; “No kidding.”

Dean shook his head. “So, yeah.”

Sam held up the scarf; “You made this?”

Dean nodded, “It’s not that great—I hadn’t learned a lot. You don’t have to keep it—“

Sam stretched it out. It was about four feet long, ugly as sin and the color of a bruised tomato. He loved it. 

Dean’s hands were flexing nervously, and he’d focused on his coffee cup so he didn’t have to see Sam’s face. “Oscar said it helped keep his hands limber, so, I thought… Why not, yanno? Better than just sitting around grabbing air tits.”

“It’s awesome.”

At first Dean looked like maybe he thought Sam was teasing him, but when Sam hung it back around his neck the tension bled out a little. Within a week Sam had another scarf. This time in black with tassels on the ends. It was still lumpy, but the stitch work was neater.

The first snowfall in late October Dean appeared downstairs with an equally lumpy scarf for bobby in dark blue and gray. Bobby turned red and practically scuffed his boot against the ground. He muttered a ‘now why would you go and do a thing like that’ but Sam could tell he liked it.

Once or twice in the following weeks , Sam caught Dean hunched over something the color of oatmeal with the tip of his tongue poking between his lips, eyes focused intently on what he was doing. Referring every so often to a crumpled piece of what looked like news print he’d taped to the inside of a notebook. Sam didn’t ask. 

Bobby grumbled and wrapped his scarf around his ears. 

Sam took Dean shopping on the ninth of November. Watched as his brother perused ‘Yarn Hell’ in the local Wal-Mart with little strands of what he had at home tied around a pencil he kept in his pocket. Sam wasn’t expecting to see Juliet there, but then again, he wasn’t entirely surprised. She gave Dean a hug and asked how his hands were feeling in the cold. 

Dean bitched about the aching in the morning and the stiffness, and Sam felt tension he’d been holding in for a year bleed out of him. Dean never bitched when it was bad. 

He drove back to Back to Bobby’s tolerating cheesy Christmas music on the truck’s radio and Dean’s chatter about this lotion shit Oscar had sent him in the mail made from sheep’s wool. He showcased his hands when Sam stopped at an intersection and wriggled his fingers. “You should try it. It’s frickin’ awesome. No more cracked cuticles.” 

Two days later Dean came down stairs with something tied up in a plastic bag and demanded to be driven to the post office. He packaged up the bundle in a box along with a handwritten letter and sent it along to Oscar in New Mexico. Then, on the way home, asked if it ever got cold enough in New Mexico for sweaters. 

Sam snorted. 

Sam got an olive green sweater for Christmas. One sleeve was longer than the other and it the yarn didn’t quite match where Dean had run out halfway up the torso, but Sam didn’t need anything else under it but a t-shirt and the frigid South Dakota winters didn’t bother him. 

Bobby snuffed and claimed he had a cold but wore his own with gruff pride. 

January was uneventful—and boring as hell. Dean bitched and bitched and bitched about cabin fever, and cable stitches, and round needles, and Jesus FUCK what he wouldn’t give to go on ONE hunt! So when Sam gave up and took him out to track down a werewolf in Nebraska for his birthday Dean spent what time he wasn’t bitching about the cold making his hands hurt around his gun messing around with ugly variegated lavender and turquoise yarn as thick as Sam’s thumb. 

“We’ve only got one more night to catch this thing, Dean, then we’ll have to wait until next month—and please, GOD tell me you’re not making that thing for me.” 

Dean looked down at his work then back to Sam—and grinned. 

0-0-0

0-0-0

0-0-0


End file.
